Rose-Engine's first commercial survival-horror game looks good

The teaser released today does not give away much, but it has me interested

Something to look forward to: Signalis has been in production since at least 2014. Studio Rose-Engine plans to start up a Kickstarter campaign to help fund production costs, but from the looks of the trailer, a lot of the work is already complete.

Indie developer Rose-Engine has just released a teaser trailer for its survival-horror game Signalis. The project has been in the works for at least four years and aside from some early concept art and a very early demo (no longer available), this is the first time the studio has released a glimpse of the current state of the game (as brief as that may be).

The original demo for Signalis placed players in the role of a Replika (an android) named Elster. The Replika was sent to a “nearby planet” by a scientist named Dr. Coombs to investigate a distress call. Elster discovers some caves and searches for survivors, but instead finds “something completely unknown.”

The current iteration has the same characters, but according to the official webpage, players will be exploring a re-education facility.

“Stranded on a desolate world, a lone Replika must explore the ruins of an abandoned reeducation [sic] facility in search for answers - and a way to escape,” says the game’s description.

The visuals remind me of the old PS One games Another World and Flashback (the original, not the crappy remake). These were fun 2.5D platformers that came out back in the 1990s. The studio describes gameplay aspects that are similar to those titles as well.

“A classic survival horror experience with a unique aesthetic, full of melancholic mystery. Explore a world with a dark secret, solve puzzles, fight off nightmarish creatures and navigate through dystopian, surreal worlds as Elster, a technician Replika looking for a lost dream.”

Rose-Engine is a two-person German studio run by Alexander Zwerger and Barbara Wittmann. The studio started as a collaborative game design project while Zwerger and Wittmann were still college students. The original Signalis demo debuted at Play14 — a creative gaming exhibition in Hamburg, Germany — in September 2014. They already have two other web-based platformers under their belts — Ascend and Coffin Counseling.

A release date has not been set yet, but the studio will be launching a Signalis Kickstarter campaign soon. I have always found minimalist games like like Another World, Flashback, and more recently, Darkwood, and Oxenfree entertaining. This one looks to have a similar flavor and has my interests up. I'm anxious to see more.